Who Gets In And Why

For anyone interested in how decisions are made about admissions to the nation’s top-ranked colleges and universities, Jeff Selingo’s Who Gets In And Why is for you. Selingo’s much anticipated book offers a thorough, detailed explanation of “holistic admissions,” the largely opaque approach used in one form or the other by most selective colleges where, in addition to grades and test scores, other factors – like extracurricular activities, personal essays, letters of recommendation, and institutional needs – are given various, shifting weights.

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Selingo took an extended, seven-month look under the admissions hood at three different selective institutions – the University of Washington, Davidson College in North Carolina, and Emory University. As part of his observations, he was allowed to read application files, listen in as admissions officers weighed the strengths and weakness of applicants, and talk to some of the pioneers of various admission practices.

In addition, he followed dozens of high school seniors throughout the year as they applied to college and reacted to the acceptance or rejection decisions they received. He focuses on three students —Grace, Nicole, and Chris—as they navigate the realities and complications of college admissions.

Selingo explores the major issues underlying admissions to selective colleges – defined as those that admit fewer than half their applicants – beginning with the fact that more high school graduates are applying to college and the number of applications they submit has increased. In 1995, 10% of high school students applied to seven or more colleges; by 2016, 35% did, in part because of the ease of online applications, and in part because colleges increased their marketing and outreach to students. According to Selingo, “They did so to show off their popularity and boost their selectivity and out of the conviction that more applications could help them fulfill an ever-expanding list of institutional priorities.”

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Selingo intends for his readers “to get a sense of what I learned during a year inside the admissions process. It’s messier than I realized, with no one pass at an applicant necessarily the final one. It’s more arbitrary. It includes deeper and wider pools of qualified applicants than any one person can imagine. It’s driven by money and agendas from so many directions. It’s making students lose perspective as they constantly try to figure out what colleges want rather than doing what makes them happy. But it’s also filled with people trying to do their best while being buffeted by a system that few can control.”

According to Selingo “The more selective the institution, the murkier its (admissions) process often is.” The process may seem precise, but in practice it’s highly subjective, a characteristic that serves institutional interests but that also appears to a skeptical public “confusing and secretive at best, and nefarious and illegal at worst.”

I asked Selingo what was his biggest surprise as he immersed himself in these admissions offices, and he told me, “the sheer number of qualified applicants competing for admissions to these schools – the depth and breadth of the applicant pools are overwhelming, and you don’t realize that until you’re part of that process yourself.”

Selingo brings as much clarity as possible to what he admits is a convoluted process, a “contraption (that) has too many overlapping and incompatible parts to work efficiently. The mechanism may ultimately serve the interests of their institutions, but a convenient by-product is a vague process that keeps applicants in the dark.”

Readers will learn about the history and the role of various admissions elements that are increasingly in the public eye: institutional marketing and recruiting, the rise of enrollment management, the college ratings race, standardized testing, tuition discounting and financial aid, early decision and early action admissions, the role of family wealth, legacies and athletics in admission decisions, grade inflation, waitlisting, the Common App, the “shaping” of a first-year class, college affordability, and the post-graduation payoffs of elite colleges and different college majors.

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While he frequently faults the admissions process and the institutional administration that sets its agenda, Selingo does not criticize the people involved in the on-the-gr0und decisions – the admissions officers and financial aid staff who strive for fair, in-or-out decisions at the same time they advance the priorities of the institutions where they work. “They’re just human beings with all the frailties the rest of us have,” he told me. “They’re doing their job.”

Selingo foresees higher education increasingly headed toward a two-tier system, “with accelerating polarization between the wealthiest colleges and the rest.” As the pool of high school students shrinks, the students enrolling in the top colleges (which he calls the “sellers”) will affect schools farther down the line (the “buyers”). He predicts, “In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, the buyers will become increasingly desperate to fill seats with tuition discounts—especially those near the bottom of higher education’s hierarchy. Those schools will flood the market with even more marketing appeals to a wider range of teenagers, offering easier ways to apply and get in, while also struggling to balance what they collect in revenue from students with what they then give out in tuition discounts.”

Selingo closes with four recommendations for improving selective college admissions: 1) eliminate the binding early decision process; 2) redesign applications to emphasize what is important – like high school grades and the rigor of the curriculum – and minimize those aspects that aren’t – like long lists of extracurricular activities; 3) encourage elite schools to accept more applicants; and 4) give students early, accurate information about the true costs of attending the colleges they’re considering.

Along the way, he sprinkles advice for students and their families for improving their approach to college admissions (e,g., take the ACT or SAT more than once; enroll in the most rigorous courses possible in high school; broaden the range of colleges to which you apply). That advice is then expanded in a very instructive and helpful appendix.

Who Gets In And Why offers a level-headed decoding of selective college admissions, unmasking the myths at the same time it reveals the realities of a system that may be dramatically transformed in the future by events in the recent past. Yet to be seen is the lasting impact the Covid-19 pandemic might have on the admissions process in years to come. Selingo told me, “it won’t be the same as in the past,” and he anticipates that early decision admissions will become more heavily used, at the same time that the use of standardized tests will decline even further.

We also don’t know how students will react to future changes. Will they focus more on academic matters, and less on extracurricular activities that may continue to be constrained by the virus? Will they shift their admissions sights to institutions closer to home? Will they become more cost conscious and less attentive to institutional prestige? Selingo’s book will equip readers with a much better insight into the current forces at work in college admissions, and it will give them a context to understand whatever comes next in that high-stakes world.

Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHY